My Good Faith Presumption when Working with Families

Is Everything Really on the Up and Up?

My baseline assumption whenever I meet anyone is that they’re a good person and I can trust them.

In almost every case, that works out well, and I hate to think what the world would look like if ever that stopped being the case.

As I’ve worked with families over the past decade and a half, I’ve often noted that chemistry is so important, much more than geography.

See Chemistry Versus Geography in Advising Families.

And that chemistry works both ways, i.e. the family members need to feel it with me, and I need to feel it from all of them too.

Unfortunately, sometimes that starts well, but then something shifts.

The common thread in those cases is almost always the discovery that someone is not acting in good faith.

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Let’s see if I can tie some of my real-world experiences into some of those ideas.

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Not being a mental health practitioner, I hesitate to put a label on such behaviour, but let’s just say that I have difficulty working with people like that because once I note their tendency to deceive, I can’t decipher what’s true anymore.

I managed to bring in a colleague who I believed was better suited to that family’s challenges, but he only ended up confirming what I saw.

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“Wow”, I thought, and perhaps even said aloud.

I have another client now where I am the only person stopping a sibling group from initiating legal proceedings against one another, and I can feel their hostility growing by the day.

Their lawyers are on standby, waiting for the call, which will light the fuse that will certainly have consequences.

That hostility has been a growing signal to me that my exit is near (phew!) but I expect to be deposed at some point in the future.

Did I mention how much I enjoy me work?

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